“Is this your pathetic revenge for having merely finished high school?”
“Maybe,” I said with a lopsided grin.
“And what are you going to do in the mean time?” the professor asked.
“I’m going with Iak to collect something we’ll need to seal the seams of the cloth,” I said coming up to him.
By the time they went off in haste for the parachutes and the medicine kit which we presumed the mercenaries had in their camp, Iak had already given Valeria another dose of narcotics. As soon as we saw it had had its effect, sending the professor’s daughter back into a deep sleep, the Menkragnoti and I set off to carry out our part of that daring project.
If in normal circumstances time is gold, that day it was gold crusted with diamonds and platinum filigree.
“How much milk of tree you want?” the Menkragnoti asked as we trotted briskly toward a small wood. It was where he said he had seen a good number of rubber trees.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, panting. “As much as we can collect before noon.”
He gave me a strange look, as if he were dealing with a lunatic he had no choice but to humor.
“You come with me to first tree,” he said, “see how I do and then you and I go separate, do more trees. Okay?”
“Perfect.”
A few hundred yards further, we reached the area Iak had found. Here several dozen rubber trees, whose bark reminded me of beeches, grew together in the shadow of the powerful ceiba trees.
Just as he had said, Iak showed me how to tap the tree for its sap. This involved making a diagonal incision in the bark, then using small lianas and empty coconut shells to collect the latex without damaging the tree—although at that moment the health of the trees was the least of my concerns. Once I understood how it was done, we set to work. We had already agreed to meet back at the temple when the sun reached its zenith, carrying with us all the latex we had collected.
The job turned out to be harder than I had expected, and what with the heat, the mosquitoes, and the stress of looking for more trees to extract their precious juice from, I ended up exhausted, sweaty, and sticky from head to toe. To make things worse, even though I finally got the knack of it after an hour, the first trees seemed reluctant to shed their blood for nothing, so I had to hack at them like a psychopath.
Nevertheless, four hours later I got back to the temple with three containers made out of bamboo sections, filled with the sap I was hoping would help us get out of there before sunset.
“Look what I’ve brought,” I said proudly as I climbed the stairs with the improvised canteens. “A whole lot of liquid rubber!”
The professor did not even look up. “Oh, wonderful,” he said without any particular interest. “Leave them in that corner beside the ones Iak has brought.”
I looked at where he was pointing and saw more than a dozen sections of bamboo trunks like mine piled against the wall. They were filled to the brim with rubber latex.
While I was out, Cassie and the professor had managed the unthinkable and carried out the task I had given them five hours before. They had gone to the camp and back, found the coveted medicine kit, and used what was still in it to clean and bandage Valeria’s wounds. They had had time to join the fourteen parachutes together with a mesh of cords, knots, and seams that would have driven a dressmaker crazy but which apparently did their job perfectly.
“Fantastic,” I said when I saw their work almost done. “You’re experts in haute couture.”
“Hunger sharpens the mind,” the professor replied, “and right now I’m starving.”
“Let’s see if Iak brings some fruit for lunch soon because I’m famished,” Cassie said rubbing her stomach.
“In the meantime,” I said, looking at that huge area of stretched-out cloth, “we can start applying a layer of liquid rubber to the seams to seal them. The way he explained it, we have to build a small fire to heat the bamboo containers. Then we’ll apply the resin with a spatula or something similar while it’s hot and sticky, before it gets cold. That’s the point when it finally turns into the flexible, adhesive rubber we need.”
“And… do you really think it’ll work with that?” the professor asked. He was looking skeptically at the shapeless pile of multicolored cloth that had been the parachutes.
“Quite honestly I don’t have the slightest idea.” I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “But it seemed like a good way to spend the day.”
They took my reply as a joke, although it wasn’t entirely. Then we heated the latex over the fire and using some pieces of bark we proceeded to apply it on the whole thing, being very careful not to leave any spot without sealing, as that would ruin our escape plan, our invention, and ultimately our own lives.
We had to work quickly. It took the rubber resin just seconds to cool and turn too stiff to handle, so that through no choice of our own it took us very little time to complete the job.
We had practically finished when we heard steps behind us. I turned around to reproach Iak off for taking so long to fetch fruit.
But the person watching us with curiosity from under the overhang of the main entrance was not the Menkragnoti.
Well, well…” he said as he pulled out a huge machete from its sheath. “What a pleasure to meet you again… and this time the daughter is here as well.” He looked at Valeria with what was now his only eye. “It seems I’m going to get to finish the job, after all.”
94
While Souza’s attention was on the wounded anthropologist, I took a casual step toward the weapons we had left leaning against the wall, by the entrance. Unfortunately that was right beside the mercenary.
Although I took care to move toward what I guessed was his blind spot, the ex-soldier saw my subtle movement. At once he checked to see where I was going and why. “Anybody moves,” he said coldly as he aimed the machete at me, “and I’ll cut their throat.”
In spite of the sad state he was in, I had no doubt that he was perfectly capable of carrying out his threat. To get a hold of one of the submachine guns, even if we tried all at once, would mean an early execution, which was presumably what he had in mind. He grabbed one of the MP5s and put the machete back in its sheath.
“If you do it…” Cassie said, “if you kill us, you’ll die too.”
“Oh, really?” he said with amused curiosity as he took off the safety catch and put a bullet in the chamber. “And why would that be?”
“Haven’t you realized?” She waved her arm toward the outside. “This place is infected with Morcegos, and sooner or later they’ll find you and kill you.”
“Sure,” he said, almost laughing, “and you’re going to protect me from those monsters, are you?”
“Better than that,” the professor intervened stepping forward. “We have a plan to get out of here, and you could come with us.”
“A plan?”
“That’s right.” He turned to the shapeless pile of parachute material that covered the ground. “We’ll leave from here by air. If you want to leave too, you’re going to need our help. Otherwise, just as Cassandra said, the Morcegos will kill you. Most likely tonight.”
Souza looked at us one by one, then lowered the gun a little as he seemed to ponder about the professor’s proposal.
The faint hope of reaching an understanding we had vanished when a cruel grin took shape on the mercenary’s lips. “Unfortunately,” he said as if he were genuinely sorry, “I have bad news for you. First, I have a way of calling for someone to pick me up in a matter of hours,”—he gleefully patted the radio at his belt—“and second, you aren’t going to live long enough to see how I get away from here.” He lifted the barrel of the submachine gun again.
“But, don’t you understand?” the professor argued. “What we have in this city goes beyond any other finding in history. It’s something that will change the world. If you kill us nobody will know a thing about it, but if you let us go you’ll share the credit for discovering it. And
you’ll be rich and famous.”
“I don’t want to be famous, and I already get paid generously enough working for Mr. Queiroz.”
“Queiroz?” I asked. “Is this Queiroz the one who wants us dead?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“But—”
“That’s enough talk,” he interrupted me. “Understand, I have nothing personal against you. It’s just some business I need to finish. I’m a professional, so—”
Suddenly he fell silent. His one eye opened wide in a gesture of incomprehension.
The three of us, equally numbed by surprise, saw the head of an arrow appear in the middle of Souza’s chest and a dark spot growing fast on his dirty shirt.
The mercenary looked down to see the slim arrowhead sticking out from his ribcage. He could not understand how the hell it had come to be there. He put his hand behind him in disbelief to find out that the arrow had indeed come in through his back, piercing him cleanly.
He gave us a questioning look, then began to turn slowly with his weapon raised as he realized the attack had come from behind. But he had no time to complete even half the turn: a second arrow flew through the air with a hiss and pierced his skull from temple to temple.
Souza fell on the stone floor of the temple in a puddle of blood. Behind him appeared Iak’s silhouette, coming up the stairs bow in hand.
He stopped by the man he had just killed and spat on his face contemptuously.
“You dead,” he said as if he needed to be brought up to date. “And you not get up again.”
As soon as we recovered from the shock, we congratulated the Menkragnoti for having arrived just in time. Without the slightest remorse for that death, Iak and I took the body outside and left it for the ants and vultures to feed on.
When we got back, we collected the basket of fruit on the steps with all the fruit he had gathered for our lunch. We all ate avidly, like cavemen gulping down mangoes, guavas, and bananas without thought for anything except satisfying the hunger we felt.
Afterward we lay on our backs with our strength renewed and our stomachs soothed for a few hours. Although what I most wanted at that moment, tired, hot, and sated, was to sleep until the following year, I had no choice but to wrestle with every fiber in my body to stand up and ask my friends to do the same.
The sun was already on its way to the horizon, and if we had not escaped the Black City by the time it vanished behind the line of trees, these could very well be our last few hours in the world of the living.
And there is no denying that it was a pretty good incentive to get going.
95
Like a pair of exiles who had narrowly escaped from a bombing, Professor Castillo and Cassie splashed through the flooded rainforest struggling to carry the heavy structure we had built—even though it was basically cloth, three thousand and eight hundred square feet of it weigh a lot. Iak and I carried two backpacks full of harnesses and ropes, and Valeria in her frail stretcher. We had added a vertical branch to it with a plastic bag full of water, a dissolved sachet of dehydrated serum (from the mercenaries’ medicine kit), and a dose of morphine. We had used a rubber tube and a hypodermic needle to inject her with this.
Unfortunately, this was a precarious solution to the problem, and her skin was turning paler as a result of all the blood she had lost.
“I hope it’s not much further.” The professor panted, almost invisible under the great lump over his head.
I took a quick look back and thought that from that angle it looked like an ungainly multicolored worm taking a stroll through the jungle: forty feet long, with two pairs of legs. A biologist’s dream and a gardener’s nightmare.
“Near now,” Iak said.
“It’s the third time you’ve said that,” Cassie complained. “I’m starting to doubt your honesty.”
“Are you sure we’re not lost?” the professor asked. “I seem to remember the way was shorter.”
“It was shorter,” I said. “This is another path. It’s a little longer, but it’s wide enough to let us through with everything we’re carrying.”
“Couldn’t you have said that before?” he protested.
“What for? I follow our friend, just like you do. If he says this way, we go this way.”
“I only hope he doesn’t get lost.”
“Don’t worry, that’s not going to happen. Besides,” I added in the style of the native, “near now.”
True to his word, Iak led us to the elevated area that surrounded the building where the Nazis had sheltered. With water on all sides now, it had turned into a sort of island in the middle of the swamp.
Once there we left everything on the ground. After we got our breath back, I urged them to go into the building to pick up something essential to our plan.
With the hesitant steps of people on the brink of collapse, Cassie, Iak, and I set to the task, leaving Eduardo to take care of Valeria. He was so exhausted he would not have been much help in any case.
Not wasting any time, we used trunks as levers and put the last of our energy into widening the irregular gap that gave access to the inner hall. We moved sections of columns and enormous segments of the floor tiles that had once covered the threshold.
Finally, with sweat flowing like a river down our gaunt faces, we managed to complete the job. Trembling from the effort, we went into the mysterious building we already knew, then on to what had been the Nazi storeroom.
“It’s nearly four,” I said when we reached the room and shone the flashlights on the row of hydrogen cylinders lined up against the far wall. “We have less than three hours left.”
“It’s going to be very tight,” Cassandra whispered, knowing what was still ahead. “Very very tight…”
Those cast iron cylinders were nearly six feet tall, and getting all of them out of there (even by rolling) needed a massive effort in our own weakened state. In the end, the three of us working together had to push each one right to the entrance, which made the job even harder than we had expected.
When we had them all by the door (seventeen in all), we tied their rusty necks with ropes and tugged them one by one, this time with Professor Castillo’s help, until we had them all out in the clearing in front of the building.
That last effort took all our remaining strength. Once we had finished, we did not so much lie down on the grass as collapse there.
My arms hurt, my back hurt, my legs hurt, even my eyebrows hurt from struggling with those gigantic cylinders. Add to that the two sleepless nights and the continued attacks from both Morcegos and men—all intent on putting an end to us—and however fit I might have been before, I was a mess. Nobody would have given so much as a carrot for me at a slave market.
It was not until I saw the sun begin to disappear behind the tops of the tallest trees that I could gather myself together and get up. Pointing to the sun sinking on the horizon, I urged the others to their feet.
To be honest, what really made them move was neither my words nor my persuasive powers, but rather a distant howl from somewhere in the rapidly darkening jungle which chilled the blood in our veins.
96
“Is that end tied properly?” I asked, using my hands to amplify the sound.
Cassie raised her hand and made a circle with her thumb and index finger, the way divers do, to signal that everything was all right.
I went over our last steps, worried by the possibility—great probability more likely—of making a mess of things at the last minute. So even though evening was slowly turning into ominous night, I did not dare take the last step until I was absolutely sure there was nothing I had missed.
All the moorings were secured with lianas and ropes to nearby blocks of rock or trees. The harnesses were firmly tied to their straps, and a mesh woven from the remaining parachute cord covered the upper part of the cloth, to give what I hoped would be the necessary rigidity to it all.
“Everything’s all right,” I said to myself after the u
mpteenth revision. “Alea iacta est.” I made circles in the air with my outstretched arm. “Doc! Iak!” I yelled. “Open the valves!”
Straight away they turned the handles of each cylinder. We had managed to stand them upright earlier with enormous effort.
Soon enough the pressurized gas began to issue from the cylinders. There were spasmodic convulsions in the sewn parachutes, as if inside that resewn cocoon some gigantic butterfly were fighting to come out.
As soon as the first two cylinders of hydrogen were empty, they opened another two more gradually so as to avoid the cloth tearing from too much pressure. Then another two, then the rest, so that what until then had been nothing more than a pile of cloth lying on the ground began to take on a definite shape. In a clumsy and lopsided way at first, later more gently and majestically, the huge mass began to rise in the air, revealing its true final shape: that of a blown up cigar.
Although to me it still looked like a multicolored worm which for some mysterious reason, defying all common sense, would fly.
“It’s working!” the professor cried, more incredulous than happy.
Cassie put her arms around my neck and planted a noisy kiss on my cheek. “I can’t believe it…” she whispered looking up at the unlikely dirigible, full of German hydrogen nearly eighty years old, as it rose toward the sky and then hung suspended ten feet above the ground with its mooring taut.
Once the dirigible—so to speak, since the thing had no rudder or anything like it to direct it with—was at its maximum capacity, with some spare cylinders (and yes, I had to endure the looks of my friends as they realized we need not have hauled all seventeen of them), and was floating lazily above our heads, we injected Valeria with a dose of morphine in the forearm and secured both her and the stretcher to the balloon.
Next, I helped the professor put on his harness (he was livid, eyes and fists closed tight at the inevitable prospect of flying in that contraption), then Cassie.
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 42